Karen waited to get her eyes adjusted to the darkness.
The sky was overcast, with a low scud blowing down toward the river. She realized they would be walking across the face of Slade Hill rather than down any slope. She suggested they bear left, partially up the hill, so that they would come down on the trailer and traverse the dirt road rather than have to climb, any part of it.
Sherman nodded in the darkness. He pushed the light on his watch.
“Nineteen-thirty,” he said. “We’d better go.”
They set out into the woods, where immediately they found themselves enveloped in a tangle of vines and thick vegetation. Sherman led the way, and they both soon picked up sticks to use to push the brambles out of their faces. She hoped they were going in a straight line across the hill, but there was really no way to tell in the darkness. The ground was soft and rocky, with patches of ankle-deep mud in places. Karen tripped and fell at one point, and then realized she had lost the .380.
They spent five minutes searching for the gun in the weeds, and this time she put it into a zippered pocket of the windbreaker. The admiral paused periodically to listen, but the woods were silent, with only some night insects and the occasional rustle of small game getting out of their way. The night air was heavy and humid as the front approached, compressing the atmosphere.
After twenty minutes, they could see a single dim light below. and to their right, which Karen assumed was the bikers’ trailer. Something snapped a stick up ahead of them in a grove of trees. They froze and listened for a few minutes, but there was no other sound. Finally, the admiral motioned that they should go on. Karen checked that she still had the gun, and she was about four paces to his left when the snake let go, an alarmingly loud buzz that sounded as if it was coming from just in-front of her. She froze..
Sherman turned around in the darkness. “Where is it?” he whispered.
“Can you tell?”
“To my right. Can’t tell how close.”
The snake buzzed again as Sherman stepped closer to where Karen had assumed her one-legged stance. He probed the bushes where the noise was coming from, then stopped when he realized he didn’t know how close the snake was to Karen.
“I’ll try to distract it,” he said, probing very carefully now with his stick. “If I feel it hit my stick, I’ll sing out, and you jump backward, okay?”
The snake stopped buzzing, and Sherman froze. “Now what?” she said, her throat dry. Neither one of them was properly dressed for rattlesnake country. Sherman swore and then began tapping his stick on the ground.
Nothing happened. Karen felt her first real surge of fear. As long as it was buzzing, she knew about where the damned thing was.
Now, she could only imagine it slithering between her feet, or gathering to strike.
Sherman stopped the tapping. “In theory, they’re as scared of us as we are of them. Supposedly, they’ll escape if allowed to.” In theory, huh?” she said. Her leg was getting tired, and she hated not being able to move. She put all her weight onto her left leg and moved her own stick to the right in the damp grass, probing for the dark patch where the buzzing sound had started. There was no response. Then she described a circle in the grass within two feet of where she was standing, still with no response.
“Hell with it,” she said, putting her foot down gingerly.
“I think it’s gone.”
Sherman beat the bushes between them more aggressively with his stick.
“I think you’re right,” he said, and turned around to proceed. He took one step, and a loud buzzing erupted right in front of him. It was his turn to freeze.
“Damn it,” he said. “Now it’s right in front of me.”
“How close?” Karen asked, trying to see around him without moving.
“Close enough,” he said, his voice tight as the snake buzzed again. “I’m even afraid to move my stick. Circle around! Come in from ahead of me and distract the damned thing!”
Karen went sideways, probing carefully ahead with her stick, moving uphill of where the admiral was frozen in place. She stepped very carefully, not placing a foot until she had swept the ground ahead and to the side. She had heard the old tale about rattlers traveling in pairs. That sounded like a big snake. She had just about made it halfway around him, at a distance of about six feet, when another snake let go, this time in front of her. As Sherman swore out loud, she froze again, focusing her senses, trying to detect the snake’s position. It’s a goddamned minefield, she thought. Then her heart gave a leap when the tip of her stick hit something that did not I feel like a tuft of grass.
The snake buzzed louder, and she realized she had stopped breathing in anticipation of a strike.
She pulled the stick back, but it caught momentarily and pulled something off the ground. She jumped back then, throwing the stick off, certain that the damned snake was on it. She stepped back and to the left, but to her horror, another snake started up to her left, about five or six feet away. She froze again, not sure of what the hell to do.
Sherman was calling to her as the buzzing stopped.
“Karen! Stand still ‘ We’ve disturbed a nest!”
“I am standing still! There’re three of the damned things out here. I don’t know which way to go!”
He had no answer for that, and they both stood there for a minute, immobilized, listening carefully. They could hear nothing but the wind.
“Karen,” he said.
“What?”
“Did you throw your stick?”
“Yes.’ “Why?” She told him. He asked if what her stick had caught on could have been a wire. She thought about it. Something had caught her stick, but had it been heavy enough to be a snake? “It might have been a wire. I thought it was a snake.”
“Okay, hang on a minute.”
She could barely see him in the darkness, but he was probing again with his stick. After thirty seconds, the buzzing started, and he stabbed down hard with the stick and then pulled the tip straight up. There was a loud buzzing noise in front of Karen, and another one off to her left.
It actually sounded as if there might be even another one to Sherman’s right, down the hill about ten yards.
“Got it,” he said. “It is a damned wire. These ‘snakes’ are electronic devices.”
“Are you real, real sure of that?” she asked, embarrassed by the sound of her own voice.
“Come over here. I have it in my hand.”
She took a deep breath and stepped sideways toward him.
When she got up close, she could see the dark wire in his hand, as well as a small black object embedded in the wire that was putting out a really good rattlesnake noise. He jerked hard on the wire, and the others in the reptilian chorus let go for fifteen seconds before going silent.
Pretty damned effective,” he said. “The good news is that we know what it is. The bad news is what might be listening at the other end of this wire.”
“Where does it go?” she said. “Up there?” They looked up the hill.
Galantz was more likely to be at the end of that wire than at Jack’s trailer. She recalled seeing the glimpse of a fallemiown house up above the trailer she had talked to Jack. But if that’s where the wire went, they were way off course.
“That light,” she said. “That might have been Jack’s trailer. We might be closer to the top than we realized.” She told him about having seen what looked like a ruined house at the top of the hill.
“Jack’s trailer,” he asked, “did it took like two people were living there?”
“It didn’t look like a human lived there,” she said, and then regretted it immediately. “I’m sorry.”
He took a deep breath. “Then we need to follow this wire,” he said, looking up the hill into the darkness. “And we’re going to be expected.”